Fatboi Sharif / Duncecap – Psychedelics Wrote The Bible
Duncecap produces a hip-hop sound-collage that fades into news broadcasts, the sounds of channel surfing, synth stabs evoking sirens, all united under Sharif’s thick delivery, making the distinctions between the samples, beats, intros and outros blur into one another. It’s so fucking simple but the piano loop on Fetus is probably the best sample of the year, haunting shit.
Landless – Lúireach
Continuing this list with a record of emotive, often achingly lonely, trad and sean-nós. An immensely arresting album where subtle polyphonies fade in and out, ghostly in their transience. Certainly the best Irish record of the year.
Magdalena Bay – Imaginal Disk
In a year like 2024, an album as lush and lovely as Imaginal Disk seems almost tone deaf – on first listen it’s damn near apocryphal, especially in a year where so many of the most acclaimed records were celebrated for their dissonance and prescience, but Imaginal Disk seems almost defiant in how it runs counter to the zeitgeist, not ignoring or even subverting it, but just standing steadfast with an album of note-to-note pop precision with such immense, bittersweet sensuality to it.
Shabaka – Perceive Its Beauty, Acknowledge Its Grace
An album of change for Shabaka Hutchings, where the formerly waning saxophonist embraces flutes alongside a wide range of collaborators – Saul Williams, Floating Points, Elucid, etc – that eschews a lot of overly dextrous phrasing, concerned instead with evocative, emotive performance and timbre. Some deriders shouted new age, but I’d argue Perceive Its Beauty, Acknowledge Its Grace is far too involved, intricate and narrow in its intentions and emotional quality to be described as such. A very wonderful album.
Natalia Beylis – Lost – For Annie
Informed equally by ecology and industrial scale destruction – the title track being used as an accompaniment to an installation by artist Annie Hogg focusing on “the environmental destruction brought on by large-scale commercial farming” – the title track Lost – For Annie utilises samples of birdsong, forests and running water juxtaposed with the sounds of industry, undercut by haunting synthlines. From the collage of interview, field recordings and music of the a-side, the b-side isolates those elements individually – an interview focusing on sweathouses in Leitrim, field recordings of ceramic and an excerpt from a mounting, growing instrumental that’s suddenly cut short. You’re presented with disparate raw materials alongside a more holistic work, and it leads to ruminations on its relationship with abstraction of industry and atmosphere, and the reality of texture and communication.
Jessica Pratt – Here In The Pitch
While Pratt already hit high with her Highjack collaboration with A$AP Rocky – one of the best songs of the year – Here In The Pitch feels like the album she was always meant to make. Five years removed from Quiet Signs, Pratt here combines her feather-breath gentle delivery with subtly lush instrumentation informed by bossa nova and 60s folk pop – much like Diamond Jubilee, it’s a melancholic evocation without feeling tired or over-trodden.
Cindy Lee – Diamond Jubilee
It’s interesting to chart the divergence from Women – how the initial splash of Viet Cong to Preoccupations, replete with indie media hype and ambition ultimately left us with this feeling of almost unrealised potential, whereas Diamond Jubilee has been a crossover success almost fifteen years in the making for Cindy Lee. Despite being so widely acclaimed for its 60s Spektor-girl-group vintageness and indie rock flair – which it manages to achieve without feeling reductive or nostalgic, a breath of fresh fucking air – it has this understated coldness to it, which brings to mind the pedigree of Public Strain while showcasing just how fucking far Cindy Lee has come since a record like Act Of Tenderness.
Ghost Dub – Damaged
Distorted dub from broken, supine speakers, old dust throbbing and threatening to scatter with each resonant bass pulse. So meticulous and minimal that even the most minute shift feels monumental. Its repetition becomes meditative, its dirtiness becomes tangible atmospheres. If you hear one electronic record this year, it should probably be Damaged.
Locust Toybox – Pleased To Be Eaten
The first big, proper canonical capital-letter RECORD from Locust Toybox since Drownscapes in 2017 sees David Firth return to his fusion of densely sampled hip-hop and IDM for an album that, despite its expectedly surreal timbre, has a real pronounced, lonesome ache to it.
Chelsea Wolfe – She Reaches Out To She Reaches Out To She
While feeling in many ways like a spiritual successor to Pain Is Beauty, She Reaches Out To She Reaches Out To She still retains the broad atmo-sludge sensibilities of her most recent Converge collaboration. Thick, textured songwriting paired with explosive production, cantering around lower-key riffing and minimal rhythms.
Adrianne Lenker – Bright Future
Bright Future was like a fucking cognitive hazard for me throughout the year – a lot of Adrianne Lenker’s solo material is, honestly. The way she ends a phrase, lets the words tremble, collapse at the end of a sentence is so effecting, the gentleness of the albums soft, broken chords, it’s so small but immense, so emotionally potent, that it’s often difficult to listen to. Whereas Lenker is always evocative, always impactful, Bright Future stands above her other work as her most compositionally accomplished to date.
Mk.gee – Two Star & The Dream Police
The sound of smooth, toothache-sweet bedroom white-alt-R&B smeared with vaseline, artificially dirtied-up – Mk.gee crossed over in an unexpected this year, and it’s a record that rubbed many the wrong way for its apparent artificiality. It reminds me of late night bus rides, listening to shit through half-busted earbuds, blurring together all-kaleidoscopic – like a half-remembered sophisti-pop record on repeat.
Scarcity – The Promise Of Rain
On the Promise Of Rain, Scarcity deliberately sought to evoke a more naturalistic sound, something more loose and improvisational, replacing the abstraction of their seismic debut – one of my favourite records – with a release that seeks to be much more barbaric, immediate and ugly in its delivery. That intention The Promise Of Rain feeling less unique, certainly, but was arguably a necessary direction to lose the shackles of their Branca black metal tag, and is a great record in its own right.
Angry Blackmen – The Legend Of ABM
Of anything on my year-end, Angry Blackmen is the project that has the most potential for a blow-up in 2025. Following the simmering hype generated by HEADSHOTS, The Legend Of ABM was their most successful record yet, leading to performances at – ironically, listening to Dead Men Tell No Lies – Pitchfork festival etc. Quentin and Brian put out a more confessional record than their debut but it’s still as frenetic and testy, from the electric immediacy of Grind, the elegiac pathos of Magnum Opus, and the impactful prescience of the Fatboi Sharif featured Dead Men Tell No Lies. Also popped out an Audiotree session back in July, too.
Lex Walton – Shame Music 2
In comparison to OG Shame Music, the second volume is much more sluggish, lethargic, like the music is being drug through miles of wire and muck to reach your ears. People call a lot of shit raw, but Lex’s expression is genuinely that – her unique command of sickly-sweet distortion paired with open-diary recollection and self-exorcising. Shame Music 2 is massive and unwieldy and unique and fantastic, like getting stuck next to someone drunk at a party, chatting your ear off, getting emotional, and is now your responsibility for thirty minutes. The explosion on Take Me From This Corpus Christi Used Car Lot was one of the best moments in music this year. Lex is one of the greatest living rock and roll musicians.
Iglooghost – Tidal Memory Exo
Waterlogged club, transporting urban tracks into dilapidated, desolate locations. Sounds of broken, fried equipment and temperamental antennae picking up disparate radio stations for seconds at a time – so much music this year was described as maximalist, but Tidal Memory Exo is genuinely overwhelming, constantly stimulating assaults of Drill, Grime, Dubstep, Bass, broad swathes of EDM shooting like electric discharge in all directions. Maybe the best sounding record of the year.
Full Of Hell – Coagulated Bliss
For a band with such an unclear direction throughout their past few splits and collaborations, no one would have been outraged if Coagulated Bliss saw Full Of Hell fall back comfortably into being extreme music elder statesman, putting out solid material but lacking the dynamism of their most acclaimed albums. That Coagulated Bliss is great, let alone arguably their best record, is a testament to their status as one of modern musics most enduringly excellent bands – here blending the expectedly dense, cacophonous, din of their noise-grind past with ambitious, massive songwriting scope.
La Torture des Ténèbres – V
A half decade removed from Memoirs Of A Machine Girl, one of black metal and noise’s most consistently quality acts released both V and The Lost Colony Of Altar Vista, a pair of excellent records. V stays in my mind moreso, for how its unrelenting harsh noise and black metal is grounded by distant, warbled guitar arpeggios and synth squawks. Among the the harshest listening experiences you’ll have this year.
Ὁπλίτης (Hoplites) – Παραμαινομένη (Paramainomeni)
Hoplites continue to play equal parts pariah and saviours within the metal world, as their blend of mathcore, Brötzmann-jazz GBH and black metal continues to elate some and repulse others. Their inhuman delivery belies just how memorable a record it is, the potential of their past releases finally coalescing into an album that’s immediately the gold standard in the current wave of dissonant extreme metal.
Elkka – Prism Of Pleasure
Probably the record that’s grown the most on me in 2024, somehow a record of both immense sensuality that detachment, isolation – like being out, seeing music, and an old memory or an old feeling or an old relationship springs to mind, removing you completely, and for a second you’re gone. Eight years on from Elkka’s debut EP, Prism Of Pleasure was a massive sleeper hit for me.
Milan W. – Leave Another Day
A record that runs counter to the Mg.kee release this year – while both dreamy guitar records, Leave Another Day is completely transparent in delivery and intent, its swirling, romantic psychedelia fully parsible, elevated by wonderful songwriting instead of aesthetic trappings.
Crizin da Z.O. – Acelero
A record whose hyped cooled down come year-end – having released back in January – Acelero was the first record I loved this year. So much music tries to evoke classic cyberpunk or something by artificially retreading some awful outrun synthwave pastiche, but Acelero’s manic combination of genre makes it feel like Colonel Campbell spitting information back at Raiden – its origin is 2024 Brazil but Acelero feels like the record of the future.
POLO PERKS <3<3<3, AyooLii, FearDorian – A Dog’s Chance
Was a toss-up between this and FearDorian’s solo self-titled record from earlier in the year, but A Dog’s Chance feels more important for 2024. Always hard-hitting, always dextrous in its syncopation, at times surprisingly lush, A Dog’s Chance just makes me fucking happy to listen to even in its melancholic moments due to the light, flitting delivery of the instrumentals and sheer energy of each guy involved.
Kali Malone – All Life Long
For as meticulous as Malone is with the authenticity of her work, these liturgical dronescapes that swirl into undefined colours and patterns, All Life Long actually has a pronounced urban quality to me – perhaps influenced by the bus and train rides its accompanied me to all through the year. Counter to the way Meredith Monk piano works evoke the bustle of metropolis, Malone’s organ and choral works evoke the early morning relative calmness, the evening hum of weary traffic, danger in the distance, tension in a home.
HypIreStition Ruins 
Leave a comment